


you became my crown

by dreamchase



Category: TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 05:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18046427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamchase/pseuds/dreamchase
Summary: There’s a dent in Yeonjun’s head that’s been there for as long as he can remember, and all the doctors have to say is that “It’s nothing to worry about.”Yeonjun’s grandmother forgets what his name is every other day but it’s with the utmost clarity that she tells him, palm hovering above his crown, her fingertips just barely grazing the ends of his hair, “They'll never understand your secrets.”





	you became my crown

**Author's Note:**

> just in case! this fic does include some passing descriptions of blood, an off-screen minor character death (and a funeral), and me being really extra and cheesy af. thanks. (p.s. its un-beta'd)

There’s a dent in Yeonjun’s head that’s been there for as long as he can remember, and all the doctors have to say is that “ _It’s nothing to worry about._ ” His parents follow suit, brushing it off as an anomaly. It’s not noticeable anyway; his hair’s wild and unkempt and it covers up any sign of irregularity.

Yeonjun’s grandmother forgets what his name is every other day but it’s with the utmost clarity that she tells him, palm hovering above his crown, her fingertips just barely grazing the ends of his hair, “ _They’ll never understand your secrets._ ” 

_Halmoni_ , he never says. _Am_ I _supposed to?_

This is the only thought he can summon to memory, dressed in all black, a bright yellow handkerchief wrung between his fingers as his mother’s shoulders shake beside him. Behind him, a stranger lets out a sob and Yeonjun closes his eyes, the humidity of the rain sticking to his skin like a film.

He thinks to ask his mother if she’s _okay_ , but the inquiry feels empty, half-hearted. The sea of mourning people surrounding him should be swallowing him whole—but all Yeonjun can think of is the knowing smile on his grandmother’s lips when she looked at him as though she knew more of the world than it knew of itself.

In the distance, he swears he can hear _halmoni_ laughing.

He opens his eyes and runs a hand through his hair, fingertips skittering across a dip in his skull. Wordlessly, he hands the yellow fabric to his mother. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Sorry for your loss,” is the first thing Soobin tells him, out-of-breath, his cheeks flushed pink as he slows to a stop beside Yeonjun. He’s careful as he tries to match his steps. “Sorry for your loss,” he says again, an ounce more composed.

Yeonjun glances up from the ground, where he’s been pointedly avoiding stepping on forgotten pieces of gum and cigarette butts. The expression on Soobin’s face is concerned, perplexed—as it usually is when the younger boy doesn’t know what to do or feel. “Did your grandpa say something to you?” 

“Yeah,” Soobin confesses quickly, too honest for his own good. He doesn’t even realize, only letting out a heavy sigh, shoulders sagging. “Something about how I should be nice to you today. Weird, right? I’m _always_ nice to you.” 

Their shoulders sort of bump and Yeonjun is reminded of how much Soobin’s grown.

“Except when you’re a brat?”

Soobin gasps. “Me? A brat? To you? I mean, you’re right, but that’s way too straightforward. I’m sensitive.” His hand lingers over his shoulder, something Soobin’s been doing more often these days, squeezing at the muscle. Soobin grimaces.

“Growing pains must suck,” Yeonjun says dryly. He won’t admit it, but he wouldn’t mind any ache in his legs if it meant growing a couple more inches.

“A little,” concedes Soobin, a stupid grin on his face. “Lucky you, you can’t relate.”

Yeonjun purposefully elbows Soobin in the side and quickens his pace, biting back a grin when he hears the younger boy yelp in protest and scamper after him. 

“You’re okay, right?” Soobin asks instead of apologizing, the little shit. “You were close to your grandma.” 

So was his mom. So was Soobin’s grandpa. So was the old lady at the _kalguksu_ restaurant down the street—the one who gives him an extra ladleful of noodles every time so he lives a _long, long life._

“What else did your grandpa say?” 

Soobin scratches his cheek. He knows better than to push the subject. “Something about how your grandma was a witch?” he says with a half-hearted shrug. “He said witches never die. They just rest.” 

“Do you think my grandma was a witch?” Yeonjun rummages through his backpack for a piece of gum, paying no mind when Soobin’s hand lands on his arm, guiding him away from a lamppost Yeonjun hadn’t caught in his periphery. 

“Dunno.” Soobin’s hand lingers. “I guess I wouldn’t mind.” He remembers half a beat later, his hand dropping to his side immediately. “Do you?”

Yeonjun’s gaze flickers to Soobin’s shoulder, where the younger boy is pushing heedlessly at an invisible soreness again. “Dunno,” he mimics. “I guess I wouldn’t mind either.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He’s only thirteen when the first case in _decades_ happens.

A boy a few years younger than him gets shuttled out of the school building by paramedics during lunchtime, and Yeonjun doesn’t see it himself, but Soobin does—and he’s breathless when he whispers, “ _Taehyun’s skin turned into diamond._ ”

Taehyun doesn’t come back to school, and when Yeonjun mentions it to his grandmother, she hardly seems affected (a contrast from how horrified his mother had been), waving it off and muttering, “ _Well, what else is his flesh supposed to be?_ ”

He doesn’t know what she means—still doesn’t—but he doesn’t ask, either. 

The last sighting of an _angel_ was before his mother, before his father’s time. In their entire living family, only his grandmother remembers. 

“ _I was twelve,_ ” she says on the days when her mind is clearer, “ _and a boy sprouted wings._ ” 

(She’s not allowed to tell him more. “ _There was blood,_ ” she’d said the first time, before Yeonjun’s mother had overheard and whisked him away, “ _and he’d cried and cried and no one could help him, but his wings. His wings were red, and then white, and they were_ beautiful.”)

And the demons, too; _halmoni_ is the only one who ever speaks of them, her smile secretive and oddly content as her hand cups Yeonjun’s cheek: “ _Light is never inherently good, just as dark is never inherently wicked._ ” She always speaks in riddles like this when her senses are with her, and he’s too young and too stupid to try to crack them.

These are the stories that build the foundation of Yeonjun’s childhood:

Once upon a time, there was light and there was dark. There were angels and there were demons. And they lived in harmony until the creatures of the world silenced them and took light and dark and made it their own. 

There is light and there is dark. There are angels and there are demons.

But there is no good, no evil, no matter how desperately human hands insist otherwise.

There is no righteous, no wicked. Only two halves of a whole.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

There’s a five-hundred won coin on the windowsill that keeps catching the light, distracting Yeonjun every time the sun peeks past the leaves. Every so often, the breeze will creep in past the barely-open window and the coin will tremble closer to the edge. 

He finds himself waiting for it to fall. 

“ _Ugh_ ,” Soobin groans, flopping over onto his side, his legs dangling over the edge of Yeonjun’s bed. “Everything _hurts_.”

“Cry about it some more,” Yeonjun replies easily, eyes glued to the comic in front of him. He bites too hard on his nail, the untended hangnail twisting, karmic in nature. This is what it takes for him to close his book, head lolling backward until it hits the mattress and the only view he has is of Soobin’s thigh and the hand massaging it. “Stop growing, then.”

Soobin groans again. “It’s not that easy, hyung,” he whines, wrinkled uniform pants all the more crumpled with each passing second. “I swear, it’s getting worse instead of better. It feels like someone’s grabbing my shoulders and pulling me upward until I’m stretched thin and my head’s stuck in the clouds.”

“Are you bragging right now?”

“ _I’m serious!_ ”

Yeonjun rolls his eyes, wordlessly shifting upward until he’s pushing Soobin over, clambering into the too-small bed beside him. “On a scale of one to—”

“Ten,” grimaces Soobin.

“Alright,” Yeonjun says, lying flat on his back, hands folded atop his stomach. He closes his eyes. “I’ll distract you. I had a weird dream last night.”

Soobin squirms, frame too large to be comfortable—but he doesn’t say a word, only inches closer to Yeonjun’s side instead of to the wall. 

“You know that dream I always had when I was little?”

“The one with the box? The _nightmare_?”

His brows furrow. “Yeah.” A bright blue box, walls closing in on him. He’s small—too small to climb out through the only opening, _meters_ above his head. Bone protrudes from his crown, two small horns that don’t come out no matter how hard he pulls. Even in youth, Yeonjun had never been much of a crier. But the entire dream, all he does is cry and cry and _cry_ until reality forces him awake. The last time he remembers having it, he was fifteen and he’d stumbled out of bed at four in the morning, his irises a glaring red in the bathroom mirror. “I had it again.” 

“Again?” Soobin murmurs, voice thick with sleep. “It’s been so long though.” 

“Yeah,” Yeonjun repeats, lacing his fingers, thumbs pressed together. “Except I wasn’t a kid this time. Still stuck in the same box though. Bright blue. Two horns. An exit way out of reach.”

“Still a nightmare, huh?”

“At the end, someone found me.” He can’t remember much aside from that—just the sound of a familiar ( _was it?_ ) voice, a hand reaching out to him, a feather fluttering down from the sky. Something red, then something white. He’d woken up feeling panicked but in a different way. “I guess it was a happy ending? The end of a saga.”

Soobin flails, throwing his leg over Yeonjun’s, his arm over Yeonjun’s torso. “Don’t fall for them, hyung! I can be your hero too!” 

He laughs in spite of himself, pushing feebly at Soobin’s arm but doing little to force any real movement. “Get off. You’re heavy.”

True to character, Soobin doesn’t move, though his grip loosens and he’s more or less relaxed in his position. “Maybe they’re an angel,” he says, quieter, the lethargy back in his tone, leaving Yeonjun to wonder if the aches keep him up at night. “Your mystery hero.”

“I thought _you_ were my hero?”

“Maybe I’m an angel too,” Soobin hums. “The growing pains are just my wings trying to come out.” 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Once, _halmoni_ explains it to him. 

In this world, for children born in light or in dark, they are always one half to a whole. “ _So_ ,” grandmother says, her breathing slow and shallow as she stretches one hand out above the blanket tucked over her lap. She looks at her palm, at the lines drawn across it, as though reading a text—something ancient, something sacred. “ _Whenever you feel lonely in the dark, Yeonjun, just know there’s someone out there feeling lost in their light. It’s only when you find each other, when you_ realize _, that the whole will be formed._ ”

He’s fourteen, then. Hardly old enough to make sense of anything his grandmother tells him, let alone anything he learns in class.

But sitting at the foot of her bed, legs crossed, gaze glued to a beat-up Nintendo DS, it’s one of the few times he thinks to ask anything.

He doesn’t ask, _what do you mean by the dark?_ Doesn’t ask, _what do you know about me that no one else does?_ Doesn’t ask, _how will I know?_ Doesn’t ask, _how will they know?_ Doesn’t ask, _how will we realize?_

Instead, as the video game in front of him is forgotten once the screen fades to black, his last life lost, he asks, “ _How did you know?_ ” 

She laughs. 

“ _You don’t have to fall in love—not necessarily. I didn’t._ ” She laughs again, her eyes clamped shut, lips curved into a smile; it must be a fond memory at the forefront of her mind. “ _You just find yourself thinking, an epiphany of sorts—_ ”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_I want this person to carry all of my secrets._

His eyes open and Yeonjun shudders. He can’t gauge how long he’s been asleep, and he’s too scared to check the time before he formulates an excuse to feed to his homeroom teacher. 

The rooftop is always quiet. No one cares enough to fiddle with the lock; no one cares enough to seek high ledges when the ground is much, much safer.

And warmer. The breeze is unforgiving.

The same dream lingers: a blue box, sharpened bone—a hand reaching for his, and this time, their fingers touch.

There’s a face this time, too. 

Yeonjun closes his eyes again, letting the back of his head fall gently against the wall behind him. He hears the door creak open; feels the sunlight fall to nothing, blocked by something standing in front of him. 

“You missed lunch,” Soobin announces. 

Yeonjun blinks, yawning exaggeratedly, arms stretched out above his head. “And? You missed me?” he replies with a tilt of his head. 

Soobin grins. “Don’t be cheesy, hyung.” 

The sky’s been gray these days, but it’s uncharacteristically blue this afternoon, wisps of white strewn across a bright canvas. It’s funny. If he squints, the clouds floating behind Soobin almost look like wings. 

“This is from Kai,” Soobin says, plopping down unceremoniously beside Yeonjun all while dropping a roll of _kimbap_ wrapped in aluminum foil onto his lap. He closes one eye, narrows the other, sunlight too bright and too harsh for him (when it’s never been enough for Yeonjun). “What are you thinking about?” 

“Nothing,” Yeonjun says first. 

( _I want this person to carry all of my secrets._ )

Yeonjun almost laughs, but he smiles instead, eyes falling shut again. His head’s starting to pound, and he doesn’t want to entertain the reason why, but in spite of it all, there’s a strange mirth bubbling at the base of his heart. 

“Nothing?” echoes Soobin.

For a second, Yeonjun doesn’t respond. He idles in silence before letting his head fall atop Soobin’s shoulder. “Everything,” he amends. “Always something.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“ _I already have someone like that,_ ” fourteen-year-old Yeonjun says flippantly. 

His grandmother raises a brow, but she doesn’t look doubtful. “ _Do you?_ ”

“ _Yeah,_ ” he says, running a hand through his hair, his knuckle brushing against the bump of his skull. 

“ _Is that so?_ ”

Yeonjun frowns. “ _It’s Soobin. He already knows everything._ ” His head hurts, not like a headache, but something throbbing deeper inside, like his skull’s too small to contain _whatever it is_. He rubs at the side of his head insistently. 

“ _Does your head hurt?_ ”

“ _It always hurts,_ ” Yeonjun grumbles. 

His grandmother hums contemplatively, and she does that _thing_ again where she purses her lips like she’s dying to tell a secret. But she never does. She murmurs to herself, “ _Are you hiding for him? Or are you waiting?_ ”

Yeonjun pretends not to hear.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

They’ve been walking to school together for as long as Yeonjun can remember. 

He’s already resolved not to go today, himself, but it only feels right to drop by their meeting place at the corner between their apartment buildings. Yeonjun isn’t quite feeling whole today; there’s something off about him, and he wonders how long he can pretend not to know what it is.

After a few minutes pass and Yeonjun realizes Soobin isn’t coming, he makes a beeline for the next best place to find him—at home.

And it’s only after he’s punched in the passcode, let himself in, meandered through an empty kitchen, an empty living room, that Yeonjun stills in front of Soobin’s bedroom door.

“Hey,” Yeonjun says, and his head is _pounding_ again, “Soobin?”

There’s a clattering noise, something—multiple somethings—falling onto the floor. Soobin lets out a hiss, a gasp, and then there’s a thud against the door. “Hyung?” Soobin calls out. “I—why are you here?”

“School?”

“You should go.” Soobin sounds out-of-breath, haggard. “You need to g—”

Instead, Yeonjun forces his way in. And he’s met by a sight that would put the cloud’s feathers to shame. So, this is what _halmoni_ meant when she said they were _red_ , and then they were _white_ , but they were _beautiful_.

“I told you,” Soobin says weakly, his body trembling, as though the weight of the bright white wings blooming from his back is still too much for him. There’s red, dried and faint on his shoulders, on the ground, but everything else is white—blinding. 

“You told me.” 

“They weren’t just growing pains.” 

“My grandpa told me,” says Soobin, his lips curving into a shaky smile, “that once I found the person who’s everything I lack, that the aches would stop.”

Yeonjun inhales softly. “Yeah? And? Did they stop?”

“Yeah.” Soobin stills. “I think I did.” 

“I had that dream again,” Yeonjun begins. “And I finally stayed asleep long enough to see who it was that pulled me out of that dark place I put myself in.” 

“Bet you wanted to stay asleep longer,” teases Soobin. 

“Nah.” Yeonjun grins. His own ache subsides, and he feels something _splitting_ until the sting is nothing but a ghost of the past. “Had to find him here. And I guess I did.” 

“Huh.” Soobin’s gaze flickers from Yeonjun’s face to the top of his head. He takes one step forward, reaching out to rest a hand where _halmoni_ ’s memories always seemed to hide. “You look like you’re wearing a crown.” 

The gap between them is smaller by the second, and Yeonjun almost spites the way he has to look up, lips barely touching Soobin’s when he whispers back, “You look like you’re carrying the sun.” 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

His grandmother starts forgetting who he is when he’s twelve. There are days when she knows him better than he knows himself, and there are days when she sees him passing and calls him _Boy_ , or _Child_ , with curiosity in her voice. 

But it’s always when she places a palm atop his head, a shaking hand feeling the dip of his skull where a horn might sprout, that her eyes clear into rivers and she calls him _Yeonjun_. 

_That’s right,_ she seems to say. _I know who you are._

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

(There are two parallel lines, jagged and pink, nothing more than scars, that have raced down Soobin’s back for as long as he can remember.)


End file.
